Israeli forces bypassed a burning barricade and marched into one of the last inhabited Jewish settlements in occupied Gaza on Sunday, hoping to completely evacuate the biggest bloc of enclaves in the area.

Confrontation loomed as several hundred young radicals, reinforcing dozens of settler families that ignored last week's army directive to leave the Gaza Strip, awaited troops sent to remove them from a cluster of settlements.

Protesters set fire to bales of hay, tyres and wooden crates at the main entrance to the settlement of Katif. Dozens of soldiers ignored the barricade, which belched black smoke into the clear summer sky, and entered through a nearby fence.

Only four of the 21 Gaza settlements, built on territory Palestinians want for a state, remain after forced evacuations last week, during which settlers were carried weeping from their homes and protesters were pulled screaming from synagogues.

The World Court says Jewish settlements are illegal. Israel disputes this.

President Mahmoud Abbas decreed that the Palestinian Authority would take over all the settlements as the Israelis pull out under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to disengage from conflict with the Palestinians.

Palestinians welcome the removal of the Gaza settlers and another 500 from the West Bank, but fear Israel aims to keep most of the other settlements housing 230,000 settlers forever. Some 2.4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank.

Contingents of unarmed soldiers also planned to head to the settlements of Atzmona, a farming community of several hundred people, and to Slav, where most residents have left, to complete the evacuation of the Gush Katif bloc.

Netzarim, an isolated settlement near Gaza City, is due to be emptied on Monday.

More than 85 percent of Gaza's settlers have gone, but resistance has been reinforced by ultranationalists like those who made stands last week at Neve Dekalim, the biggest settlement, and Kfar Darom, an outlying religious outpost.

Opinion polls show most Israelis favor leaving Gaza and saw it as too costly to keep defending the 8,500 settlers who lived there alongside 1.4 million Palestinians.

Evacuations have gone more than twice as fast as officials had predicted, but two remaining settlements in the West Bank, now due to be evacuated on Tuesday, could prove more difficult.

Sanur and Homesh, built on territory where many religious Jews feel an even closer biblical bond than in Gaza, are seen as potential flashpoints because of an influx of rightist Israelis from the most radical West Bank settlements.

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